A Second Hand Conjecture

Texas leads the way with 18 protests and 64,000 attendees.

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A pretty comprehensive list for Texas here. I roughly estimate around 64 protests planned for just Texas. You’ll note that other states are listed on the right. I’m closer to the Sugarland one and may check it out. I’m curious to see just how big it will be, especially considering there’s about 4 other Tea Party protests planned for the Greater Houston area.

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H.C.R. 50 has been introduced to the Texas House. Authored by Texas State Representatives Brandon Creighton, Bryan Hughes, and Leo Berman, it reasserts Texas’s rights of sovereignty under the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution.

RESOLVED, That the 81st Legislature of the State of Texas
hereby claim sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise
enumerated and granted to the federal government by the
Constitution of the United States; and, be it further
RESOLVED, That this serve as notice and demand to the federal
government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective
immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these
constitutionally delegated powers; and, be it further
RESOLVED, That all compulsory federal legislation that
directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal
penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation
or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed; and, be it
further

It was only introduced yesterday, but it will be very interesting to see if this passes.It would be really amazing to see a resurgence in the 10th Amendment.

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Financially according to the Financial Times. Check out this interactive map of the states and their comparative rankings in different financial categories.

(HT: Megan McArdle)

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Looks like we might not be seeing much more of Chris when this launches.

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A Kansas family noticed that the shipping materials used by a Texas company were composed of shredded personal checks. The family was able to tape the shards back together, revealing numerous account numbers. The company says they’ve been using shredded checks as packing material for years…yikes.

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A small Texas School district approved a plan to allow teachers to carry concealed handguns on school grounds last October and will see its first school year open later this month with that plan in effect. As far as I know, and as anyone in the article knows this is the first experiment of its kind and thus it will be interesting to see the result. However it will be a long term result no doubt, and we probably won’t hear much of this district again, which is a good thing.

The reasoning sited was,

“When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ’sic ‘em’ to a dog,” Thweatt said in Friday’s online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

But I think I’ve found the real need for this measure.

The 110-student district is 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth on the eastern end of Wilbarger County, near the Oklahoma border.

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Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr is doing very well in the latest Zogby poll Eric Dondero at Libertarian Republican informs us. The poll has Barr at 6% in Texas and Florida and a pretty impressive 10% in New Hampshire.

State: Texas

Summary:
McCain – 42%
Obama – 39%
Barr – 6%
Nader -2%
Someone else – 4%
Undecided – 7%

Over 3,200 were surveyed in the poll, from June 11 – June 30.

Of course this also means Obama is only 3% back of McCain in Texas. So this poll may be an outlier, but hopefully future polls will continue to show the Libertarian candidate getting an historic amount of votes. The goal being to shift the Republicans to the libertarian side of the party.

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This has to be seen by all judicial and college football fans. I’m not sure what the original complaint was, but the opinion is great. Pay special attention to the footnotes to learn that it is the official opinion of the U.S. Judicial system that the “Game of the Century” for this century is the 2006 Rose Bowl. Images of the document after the jump.

EDIT: More at the comments at Volokh.

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If any of you were wondering how BBQ is done down in Texas, check out this Brisket Pictorial that will no doubt leave you craving some good Q. Here’s what we start with,

He messes up the cabbage a little, but it still came out alright. Finished product after the jump.

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Many of you may have seen the Absolut Vodka ad that ran in a Mexican magazine recently in links around the blogosphere. Now the mocking has begun as well. I submit this more historically accurate version of their ad.

While California, Arizona, New Mexico and the rest of the green land may have been “stolen”, from Mexico after the US conquered them, Texas fought for and won its own independence.

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Via Glenn Reynolds, Wired posts an article describing the fight to include evolution in the science curriculum for students in Florida and Texas:

Charles Darwin was born 199 years ago Tuesday, but the debate he ignited about the origins of species rages on. Florida’s department of education will vote next week on a new science curriculum that could be in jeopardy, because some conservative counties oppose it.

Nine of Florida’s 64 counties have passed resolutions over the last two months condemning the new curriculum that explicitly calls for teaching evolution. The resolutions, passed in heavily Christian counties in the state’s northern reaches, demand that evolution be “balanced” with alternative theories, mainly creationist…

Watchdogs say the stakes are high in the pending vote. If Florida backpedals from evolution, Texas may follow suit. Texas is scheduled to update its own science standards this year. In November, an education official was fired for mentioning a pro-evolution lecture. Along with California, Florida and Texas are the largest purchasers of textbooks in the nation.

“Texas buys about 10 percent of all K-12 textbooks, and Florida buys another 8 percent,” said Lawrence Lerner, a science-curriculum expert at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education watchdog. “If they want creationism in their textbooks, Wyoming may not have a choice.”

I still have a hard time swallowing this argument. Is the publishing world so archaic and backwards technologically that they can’t churn out different versions of textbooks for 18% of their customers, while delivering what the other 82% really want? Diane Ravitch made the same case in The Language Police (an excellent book; I highly recommend it), but I didn’t really buy it then either.

Nevertheless, the reason its even an issue is because the state mandates what the curriculum will be for each and every school.

Florida’s current science standards, which tell teachers what their students must learn, don’t mention evolution by name. In 2005, a prominent education think tank gave Florida a failing grade in science teaching, prompting education officials to overhaul the curriculum. The new standards, drafted last October, explicitly called evolution “the fundamental concept underlying all biology.”

But nine counties — Baker, Clay, Hamilton, Holmes, Jackson, Madison, St. Johns, Taylor and Washington — have passed resolutions officially calling for the teaching of evolution to be balanced with alternative explanations of life’s origins, almost certainly religious.

The resolutions have been patterned after the one from St. Johns County, which calls for “teaching the scientific strengths and weaknesses of the theory rather than teaching evolution as dogmatic fact.”

Critics say the resolutions’ language is thinly veiled creationism — either in the strictly biblical sense, or the more-modern take of “intelligent design,” which purports to use scientific methodology to prove divine intervention.

“We’re concerned that we not impose state standards that prevent an open dialogue concerning other theories,” said David Buckles, superintendent of schools in Putnam County, which is also considering opposing the new curriculum. “Did life begin in ice? Or was it the Genesis version? Or intelligent design? We want the pros and cons of all of it.”

Looking just at the bolded portions, isn’t that where the problem lies? Does this issue ever come to a head if there weren’t some state regulators “imposing” rules on the schools? Or am I just some crazy libertarian nutter who doesn’t appreciate the value of a public education (yeah, some value)?

In fact, I do see the value in having an educated public, but over the past 30 years or so I don’t see governments actually accomplishing that task. Instead, we get propagandized curriculum that has little to no bearing on the real world. Classrooms are used as social science labs, and students are treated as the guinea pigs. Whether its the idiots trying to shove PC, multi-culti, white-people-are-racists nonsense down our kids throats, or bible-thumpers filling their heads with religion dressed up as science, I don’t see an educated populace being created. I see a bunch of poorly equipped kids being fed ridiculously antiquated and/or downright false ideas. And to top it all off, we are treated to nanny-staters of all types duking it out in a game of moral oneupmanship for our political amusement. How does any of that add to the value of public education?

I’m one of the lucky ones who can send my kids to private school (barely), but what about all those parents who don’t have that choice? Their kids are left to suffer at the hands of petty bureaucrats and teachers unions, each with their own agenda that’s applied in a “one size fits all” manner, regardless of what might be truly best for the child. And heaven forbid that a teacher develop his or her own method of educating. If that were allowed, then how would the bureaucrats maintain control? Next thing you know, they’ll want merit pay.

For so long as the state is in charge of education, these sorts of problems will only get worse. Are vouchers the answer? I think they would help by putting choice back into the hands of parents. But that wouldn’t do anything about abominations like No Child Left Behind, and the ridiculous wrangling over evolution that comes up again every couple of years. In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to get the state out of the business of education entirely.

By that I don’t mean pulling out all tax dollars. Even though my children don’t actually benefit from it, I don’t have a problem with helping kids get an education. I just have a problem with the government being the one to control and deliver it. Instead, I’d say let all schools be private, and let the government funds used for education now be set aside for use by parents, without any strings attached. They could apply the money towards the school of their choice. And let the schools decide what and how they will teach. If one school doesn’t prepare kids for the future as well as another, then it will see a loss of income. It will be forced to give parents what they want, or go out of business. And for every school that is successful, thus earning a greater share of the tuition, another one will spring up to grab some of that lucrative pie. In the end, we would have schools that are responsive to the needs of children and their parents, and not beholden to local, state or national politics.

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One of the sadder aspects of Ronpaul’s candidacy is how many people (who can barely afford to do so), have been convinced to give well over their means to his campaign. My friend Jason has a co-worker who he believes took out a second mortgage solely to give more money to Ronpaul, convinced that he was “America’s LAST CHANCE!!!” A commenter on a Vaughn Ververs post at CBS News isn’t sympathetic to their plight, but he does tell the truth: “LOL. Ron Paul pulled off the perfect swindle of his fawning disciples. He took them for $30 million, most of which he did not spend, and now will two-step on back to Texas with the rest of the loot.” What do you suppose he will do with that enormous windfall? We might soon see “Director of Ronpaul Institute” appearing under Lew Rockwell’s name.

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Well, kinda. After the whole row over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s declaration that Sharia Law in Britain is “unavoidable“, Eugene Volokh notes that it has been allowed in some US court, in a way. It seems some parties entered into a contract that provided for arbitration based off of rules of sharia law, and the judge upheld the arbitration. From my understanding, this isn’t a judge using Sharia to make a ruling, nor it being enshrined into a legal system, but simply provisions of a contract being upheld. Perhaps Michael can chime in and let me know where I’ve erred, and clarify it some more. This is not to say that I agree with the Archbishop, but just thought it was interesting to keep in mind.

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Yeah, that’s me after a few too many cocktails in the hotel lounge. As Lance related, I’m in Houston in the Texas Medical Center (TMC) visiting my father who recently had an internal defibrillator put on his heart. The surgery went remarkably well and he seems more lively than when he went under the knife on Thursday, but he’s trapped in the bureaucratic waiting-for-approval world of hospitalization that feels like standing in line at the DMV…only with your ass hanging out of a gown. Thus my mother and I keep him company during the day and sit starring at the hotel walls at night. I decided to start obliterating the time with vodka this evening, thanks to the encouragement of the medical-student bar staff who have seen this all before.

As always when I’m here, I’m struck by the bizarre experience of this health care city (and I’ve unfortunately been here a lot with Dad’s ongoing heart problems). The TMC is the largest medical district in the world, with one of the highest concentrations of hospitals, clinics, research centers and doctors anywhere (photo of the TMC’s rows and rows of hospitals). Just looking out my hotel window I can see the Texas Children’s Hospital, St. Luke’s Hospital, the Methodist Hospital, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor’s College of Medicine, Ben Taub Hospital, office tower after office tower of medical offices, research facilities…and seemingly perpetual construction for even more. There’s a boutique across the street for designer scrubs (the official uniform of this city-state) and almost every store/cafe/bar has a somewhat medical theme or is named after a famous surgeon, doctor or whathaveyou.

It’s a highly Ballardian place, full of sanitized winding corridors to nowhere, sterilized corporate conformity, multi-million dollar ugly sculpture, startlingly advanced high technology, foreign doctors nabbed from the world over, meticulously manicured lawns, smiling receptionists in vivid eyeshadow…and just beneath the surface –infecting the place with its sole purpose– life and death. Think Super-Cannes for physicians.

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